This post is by Marijana Vujošević (pictured above), who is working on a project on Immanuel Kant’s moral psychology at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). In this post Marijana summarises her approach in a new paper 'Conscience as the Rational Deficit of Psychopaths'. While writing my paper on Kant’s theory of conscience (' Kant on Conscience: The Judge in the Mirror '), I had become very interested in issues regarding lack of conscience and immorality in psychopathy. Psychopaths are commonly described as individuals without conscience. Even if we weaken this claim by stating that they possess an underdeveloped conscience (which I propose we do), we still need to explain whether this impairment affects their competence in judging moral issues and in being motivated to act morally, and if so how. In spite of the usual portrayal of psychopaths, moral psychologists do not find the link between psychopaths’ impaired conscience and their moral dys...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health